Variety's Scores

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For 17,760 reviews, this publication has graded:
  • 52% higher than the average critic
  • 4% same as the average critic
  • 44% lower than the average critic
On average, this publication grades 2.3 points lower than other critics. (0-100 point scale)
Average Movie review score: 63
Highest review score: 100 IMAX: Hubble 3D
Lowest review score: 0 Divorce: The Musical
Score distribution:
  1. Positive: 9,121 out of 17760
  2. Mixed: 7,003 out of 17760
  3. Negative: 1,636 out of 17760
17760 movie reviews
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  1. The Salvation
    There’s really only one ingredient for which The Salvation is likely to be remembered: Eva Green.
  2. The Rover
    Michod’s sophomore feature isn’t exactly something we’ve never seen before, but it has a desolate beauty all its own, and a career-redefining performance by Robert Pattinson that reveals untold depths of sensitivity and feeling in the erstwhile “Twilight” star.
  3. Foxcatcher
    If the screenplay, by Dan Futterman (“Capote”) and E. Max Frye, is relatively spare in terms of dialogue, it’s satisfyingly rich and thorny in its conception of the tightly wound triangle at its center, while Miller’s direction evinces the same sustained intensity and consummate control of his material that defined his first two features.
  4. Wrinkles
    Although nothing here quite matches the moving, life-in-five-minutes montage in Pixar’s “Up,” one swooping flashback sequence comes very close.
  5. Lila Lila
    Alain Gsponer’s well-crafted romantic comedy, glides along on the sheer power of rising German star Daniel Bruhl’s boyish charm.
  6. Words and Pictures
    Both the words and the pictures are surprisingly flaccid, largely due to Gerald DiPego’s literate but hopelessly contrived screenplay and direction that lacks Schepisi’s usual snap.
  7. Edge of Tomorrow
    The pleasure of Edge of Tomorrow is that it’s not an action movie first and foremost, but rather a cheeky little puzzle picture in expensive-looking blockbuster drag.
  8. Blended
    Blended suffers from a fundamental lack of trust in its audience, following every unexpectedly smart exchange with a numbskull pratfall or one-liner, and every instance of genuine sincerity with an avalanche of schmaltz.
  9. Cyber-Seniors
    Though there might have been some real drama to tap in following some seniors’ efforts to reconnect with their long-lost loves, Cassaday either doesn’t find any such intrigue, or didn’t bother looking for it.
  10. DamNation
    The film’s haphazard focus muddies the waters without doing anything to clarify the overall stakes. Fortunately, the continual visual splendors make a rather striking argument of their own.
  11. 50 to 1
    It’s more of a bawdy buddy movie about the horse’s trainer, Chip Woolley, and owner, Mark Allen (who exec produced), with a bit of slapstick thrown in.
  12. Hellion
    More sensitive than sensational, Candler’s debut doesn’t add much in the way of insight to the juvenile delinquency genre, but boasts a stunning breakthrough performance from newcomer Josh Wiggins as the troublemaker in question.
  13. Citizen Koch
    Some material in the docu feels repetitive or unnecessary. But the main problem is that “Citizen Koch” simply juggles too many themes and narratives to cohere. The result is largely compelling in the moment, but unsatisfying as a whole.
  14. Dinosaur 13
    [An] engrossing documentary.
  15. How to Train Your Dragon 2
    If necessity is the mother of invention, then DreamWorks’ desire to extend the Dragon franchise has propelled the creative team in the most admirable of directions, resulting in what just may be the mother of all animated sequels.
  16. Horses of God
    Ultimately, the training and suicide mission are less interesting to Ayouch than the initial forming of character, and the fundamentalist cell members are only stock figures; what’s important is the group’s sense of disenfranchisement and the lure of inner peace.
  17. Wolf Creek 2
    Neither as striking nor as fundamentally scary as its predecessor, this pumped-up, robustly crafted pic is still quite a ride.
  18. Cold Bloom
    Maintaining an unhurried tempo and an air of hushed reverence, the pic furtively hints at Shiori’s loneliness and despondency even as she soldiers on, until a series of revelations by Takumi culminates in a liberating finale.
  19. A People Uncounted
    This globe-trotting debut effort by helmer Aaron Yeger and his producing team offers a vivid mix of visual evidence, historical commentary and survivor testimonies. It’s less successful trying to integrate the struggles of today’s Roma, which merits a docu of its own.
  20. Breastmilk
    Ben-Ari seems just as invested, if not more so, in the social and psychological obstacles that can make breastfeeding problematic, and she explores them with impressive rigor, sensitivity and a refreshing lack of judgment, listening intently while prescribing little.
  21. X-Men: Days of Future Past
    If the characters’ quandaries at times feel overly circumscribed, they’re also advanced with a bracing emotional directness, devoid of either cynicism or sentimentalism, that touches genuine chords of feeling over the course of the film’s fleet 130-minute running time.
  22. Welcome to New York
    A bluntly powerful provocation that begins as a kind of tabloid melodrama and gradually evolves into a fraught study of addiction, narcissism and the lava flow of capitalist privilege. [Unrated Version]
  23. Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia
    The grounding material here is with the elderly Vidal himself... Unfailingly witty and devastatingly insightful, he personifies that near-extinct species — the public intellectual.
  24. The Discoverers
    Schwarz lacks the writing chops to adequately embed the character’s predictable learning curve into a richer narrative fabric, but Dunne’s perf is pitch-perfect.
  25. Godzilla
    Edwards seems to have miscalculated our investment in his cast...simultaneously underestimating how satisfying some good old-fashioned monster-on-MUTO action can be.
  26. Harmontown
    The extent to which it’s hilarious and revelatory, however, may depend on viewers’ degree of prior intimacy with all things Harmonic.
  27. Stage Fright
    Most frustratingly, the film rarely manages to meld its two parent genres at all, with musical-theater pastiche dominating the early going, and straight slasher pastiche taking over around the halfway point, and rarely the twain do meet.
  28. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return
    “Oh, Toto, this doesn’t look like the Oz I remember,” Dorothy murmurs at one point. Truer words were never spoken.
  29. Still I Strive
    The power of performing arts to restore hope to damaged young lives is marvelously captured in Still I Strive.
  30. Farmland
    Though the perspective of farmers is well worth examining, this good-looking 77 minutes of propaganda is heavy on sugar-coating and light on nutritional value.
  31. Next Goal Wins
    No sports film is short on pep talks, bonding sessions and heartfelt analogies to family kinship, but the teammates’ easy acceptance of Saelua — and her robust performance on the pitch — give the proceedings an extra kick.
  32. Moms' Night Out
    There’s nothing wrong with Moms’ Night Out that couldn’t be fixed by a massive rewrite, preferably one that involves a lobotomy for the main character.
  33. The M Word
    The lively but wildly erratic result will surely please Jaglom’s winnowing fan base, while baffling most others and doing little to deter Jaglom himself.
  34. Walk of Shame
    Watching the redoubtable Elizabeth Banks try to breathe life into the stillborn farce Walk of Shame is like watching a team of paramedics perform CPR on the corpse of Ulysses S. Grant.
  35. More Than the Rainbow
    [A] loosely structured, always informative, sometimes illuminating portrait docu.
  36. Bad Johnson
    The film manages to be an often uncomfortable experience without fully embracing its own bad taste, starting with an inherently insane premise and somehow steering it through the most basic of romantic comedy paces.
  37. Buttwhistle
    The second feature from writer-director Tenney Fairchild (“The Good Humor Man”) actually attempts to be an emotionally resonant relationship tale, but lives down to its title by delivering nothing but inane comedy and insufferable drama.
  38. The Girl and Death
    The film’s emotional center rings coldly hollow, its star-crossed lovers coming off more like projected figures than flesh-and-blood players.
  39. Million Dollar Arm
    Sometimes a hard-hitting expose, sometimes a big-hearted crowdpleaser, Million Dollar Arm wants it both ways to be sure, but its instincts are mostly right on the money, as are its actors.
  40. All Cheerleaders Die
    It’s a fond, briskly diverting homage, but not a truly inspired one.
  41. Ida
    It’s one thing to set up a striking black-and-white composition and quite another to draw people into it, and dialing things back as much as this film does risks losing the vast majority of viewers along the way, offering an intellectual exercise in lieu of an emotional experience to all but the most rarefied cineastes.
  42. The One I Love
    Boasting spectacular performances from Duplass and Elisabeth Moss as a husband and wife on the brink of separation, this incredibly assured directorial debut of Charlie McDowell essentially turns the idea of a two-hander upside down and inside out.
  43. Walking with the Enemy
    Made with obvious passion and drive, but also a nagging predilection for Holocaust-drama cliches.
  44. Small Time
    The narrative becomes more tenuous the deeper it strays into drama.
  45. Tasting Menu
    Bringing together some of the least compelling dinner guests in recent memory at a world-class restaurant that’s about to permanently close its doors, this blandly seriocomic misfire from Spanish co-writer/director Roger Gual is too lazy to rise to the level of farce, too banal and insincere to work as drama.
  46. Brick Mansions
    Delamarre knows his way around an action scene and keeps the proceedings moving briskly enough, even if the picture clocks in at about 10 minutes longer than its taut, 81-minute predecessor.
  47. The Machine
    Closer to “Her” in its musing on human/machine connectivity, while also incorporating the dystopian and action-thriller aspects of “Blade Runner” and its ilk, albeit on a much smaller scale, the pic will divide fantasy fans, some of whom will give it props for breaking somewhat from genre formula, while others will be disappointed by the largely budgetary limits of its imagination.
  48. Beneath the Harvest Sky
    Beneath the Harvest Sky offers a heartbreakingly authentic, vividly realized account of adolescent frustration and yearning.
  49. For No Good Reason
    While the effort is admirable, the result is a bit unwieldy, casting too wide a net to really plumb its subject’s depths, and defanging some of Steadman’s acid wit with an overly busy, hit-and-miss aesthetic approach.
  50. Last Passenger
    A sturdy runaway-train thriller that flaunts its influences but chugs up a decent amount of suspense.
  51. The Other Woman
    As it winds its way toward an unexpectedly grisly final showdown, The Other Woman often feels stranded between gross-out comedy, romantic fantasy and distaff psychodrama in a way that compels fascination and impatience alike.
  52. Lucky Them
    The film’s truest and most meaningful chemistry is generated by Ellie and Charlie, two individuals who are so fun to hang out with that they justify even the film’s flimsiest narrative setups.
  53. The German Doctor
    As horror scenarios go, Puenzo’s setup takes the most heavy-handed approach possible.
  54. Make Your Move
    A slick, disposable soap opera.
  55. A Haunted House 2
    It’s certainly likely to be among the worst movies in wide release this year, but it’s far from the most hateable, and that should count for something.
  56. Gabrielle
    Archambault’s handling of Gabrielle and Martin’s sexuality is one of the pic’s strong suits, presenting their desire with a refreshing, straightforward honesty.
  57. Obvious Child
    The humor springs either from real-world recognition, as Robespierre and her co-writers go where others fear to tread, or in response to the cast’s lively, eccentrically lived-in characters.
  58. God's Pocket
    John Slattery makes a wobbly transition into feature filmmaking with this drab and uninvolving dark comedy.
  59. Nas: Time Is Illmatic
    This brisk, stylish and extremely heartfelt portrait of Nas’ rise from the housing projects of Queensbridge to the heights of hip-hop royalty ably stands on its own, marked by an admirable focus on the man and his music rather than hype and hagiography.
  60. Dancing in Jaffa
    A surprising, well-crafted documentary.
  61. Stand Clear of the Closing Doors
    Consistently fascinating and suspenseful.
  62. That Demon Within
    Lam’s darkest work to date, one where violence is not just graphic but ugly, and Hong Kong symbolically comes to resemble a charnel house.
  63. Cesar's Last Fast
    While not necessarily the definitive cinematic account of Chavez’s life or the UFW movement, Cesar’s Last Fast provides a well-crafted, sometimes stirring encapsulation.
  64. Transcendence
    There are intriguing, half-formed ideas afoot in Transcendence, but the script and Pfister’s heavy, humorless direction tend to reduce everything to simplistic standoffs between good and evil.
  65. Heaven Is for Real
    Those willing to engage may be pleasantly surprised by some of its understated virtues.
  66. The Players
    The Players is an odd beast that, like all omnibus films, is only as strong as its weakest link.
  67. The Love Punch
    A creaky heist-caper comedy that hopes to get by on sunny amiability.
  68. The Sea
    [A] good, middlebrow adaptation — which, despite being scripted by Banville himself, sacrifices much of the novel’s structural intricacy for Masterpiece-style emotional accessibility.
  69. Magic Magic
    Meticulously acted, gorgeously shot and hilariously insightful about the strange, inarticulable ways people can get on one another’s nerves, this psychological thriller takes its premise to surprising, darkly comic extremes.
  70. Proxy
    Skirting horror and black-comedy terrain without quite surrendering to either, the pic proves rather bracing even if it doesn’t hold up to much plot-logic scrutiny.
  71. Perfect Sisters
    Stan Brooks’ first directorial feature provides scant psychological depth, drawing its characters and staging their incidents in crude fashion, despite superficial production gloss.
  72. Bad Country
    A blandly executed action-thriller whose cast names (Matt Dillon, Willem Dafoe) and mild ’80s Louisiana flavor offer only modest compensations for the story’s workmanlike construction and routine twists.
  73. Bears
    Surely some of the film’s various incidents have been creatively stitched together from stray bits and pieces of footage, but its central conflict is an entirely organic one, and rarely is any offscreen string pulling distractingly evident.
  74. The King of Escape
    A marked strength of the movie is that it does succeed in making the unlikely central love affair believable within its own universe.
  75. A Fragile Trust
    [A] meticulous postmortem.
  76. Detonator
    The filmmakers etch the character dynamics so astutely that we never doubt the credibility of even the most ill-considered actions.
  77. Jinn
    [A] ponderously paced, needlessly convoluted and altogether unexceptional thriller.
  78. Alien Abduction
    A sci-fi thriller as generic as its title, Alien Abduction generates only low-voltage shocks.
  79. Ilo Ilo
    Anthony Chen is remarkably astute in his depiction of the class and racial tensions within such a household, his accessible style enabling the characters’ underlying decency and warmth to emerge unforced.
  80. Draft Day
    Draft Day affords the simple but uncommon pleasure of watching intelligent characters who are passionate about what they do trying to do the best that they can.
  81. Half of a Yellow Sun
    The rare prestige pic that could actually stand to be longer.
  82. The Amazing Spider-Man 2
    Redundancy remains a problem, but this overlong superhero sequel gets by on sound, fury and star chemistry.
  83. Hank and Asha
    Kakkar and Pastides generate a rooting interest in their characters, with compellingly persuasive performances.
  84. Policeman
    This fascinating but uneven pic has a conceptual rigor that doesn’t always translate into compelling viewing or even a smooth narrative whole. Nevertheless, it reps a strong debut from tyro helmer-writer Nadav Lapid.
  85. Fed Up
    A formulaic and functional documentary that nevertheless proves effective at getting the message out about America’s addiction to unhealthy food.
  86. Cold in July
    A superior piece of Texas pulp fiction that starts out like a house on fire, sags a bit in the middle, then rallies for an exuberantly bloody finish.
  87. A Promise
    Led by a trio of lackluster performances from Alan Rickman, Rebecca Hall and “Game of Thrones” thesp Richard Madden, this awkward, passionless drama conveys neither the sensuality nor the drawn-out sense of longing required by its period tale of a young secretary who falls in love with his employer’s wife.
  88. Watermark
    Despite the staggering range of material Watermark manages to present — Burtynsky’s five-year undertaking is certainly the most encompassing survey any one artist has ever dedicated to the subject — it’s still just the tip of the metaphorical iceberg.
  89. In the Blood
    Pulses are likely to remain level during In the Blood, a serviceable vehicle for MMA champ Gina Carano.
  90. Afflicted
    A low-budget horror-thriller that’s resourceful enough to wring a few fresh chills from a slender premise and a less-than-novel formal conceit.
  91. Blumenthal
    A limp facsimile of a Woody Allen ensembler set in a familiar world of New York Jewish intellectuals — minus only the wit, and the intellect.
  92. Locker 13
    Only those scared of being bored to death need fear Locker 13, an omnibus of horror stories that could hardly be more tame, talky and tepid, both individually and as a whole.
  93. Boys of Abu Ghraib
    The film has a very good idea in using a single soldier’s perspective to explore how tension and boredom can lead to such extreme misconduct, but it doesn’t go far enough, in the end leaving a disgraceful chapter just dimly illuminated in psychological terms.
  94. Greencard Warriors
    For all its sincere intentions, Kruishoop’s script feels cobbled together from newspaper headlines and bits of other movies rather than real, lived experience.
  95. The Quiet Ones
    The 1970s setting offers a retro feel that should strike appealing chords for fans of old-school horror, but there’s little here that’s exactly new or fresh.
  96. Queen
    The film could easily be a half-hour shorter; shot in a loose, handheld style that involved some improvisation, it feels unfocused and repetitive at times, to the point of aimlessness.
  97. Island of Lemurs: Madagascar
    A pleasant if fairly pedestrian viewing experience, one that more or less gets the job done in terms of balancing the requisite ooh-ahh moments with another unsurprising reminder of man’s capacity for selfishness and destruction.
  98. Hasee Toh Phasee
    It makes the regeneration of an overweight and complacent commercial format look easy.
  99. A Night in Old Mexico
    Scripter Wittliff and Spanish helmer Emilio Aragon (“Paper Birds”) hit the sweet spot between galloping and sauntering while unfolding the movie’s plot, an interlocking chain of coincidences, encounters and colorful supporting characters that often recalls the twisty storylines of Elmore Leonard.
  100. Tom at the Farm
    It’s an improbably exciting match of knife-edge storytelling and a florid vintage aesthetic best represented by Gabriel Yared’s glorious orchestral score.
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